


Ghosts

by ladyofbrileith



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-06 21:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/423556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyofbrileith/pseuds/ladyofbrileith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stuck where Hiro left him, Adam revisits his far and recent pasts and the moments when things could have been different. All dialogue taken directly from "Out of Time" and "Powerless"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a muse writing community on the basis of this prompt: "If you were Scrooge and three ghosts came to visit you, where would they take you in your past, present, and future?"

The darkness is pressing, suffocating, all around him. It’s complete silence, where the sound of his racing heart pounds in his ears and seems to echo off of the satin walls of his new cage. He screams for hours, he thinks, ripping his throat raw, tasting blood. The wounds disappear only to rip open again as he begs for Hiro, for someone, for anyone, to come. Eventually he simply can’t anymore. No one is coming, and the air is thin. He can’t see anything, but he can feel how near it all is. The weight of the Earth rests on him, the satin a mocking softness, like the pillow under his head. Nails shred it in desperation, only to bloody themselves on wood that he pounds on as tears streak down his cheeks.   
  
_How?_ The question rolls inside of him, again and again until his mind is screaming with it even as his voice keeps its peace. _How? Why?_  
  
Hours, days, some immeasurable span of time before, it had all seemed so near, so close, the world at his fingertips, ready to be reshaped as he issued in the New Age of Man. Now the air is thin around him, his heart speeding up even as he tries to calm it, breathing slow, shallow, trying to reduce his need for oxygen. He never believed he could fail. He never believed Hiro would stop him. He never thought, even if he did, that it would come to this. Worse than death. Worse than grief. Worse than loss.   
  
It almost makes him scream again, and he bangs against the wood of the lid, helpless in fury and fear, feeling splinters slide into his skin. His body pushes them back out and he bangs again, feeling them gouge deep. It’s a cycle, a rhythm, the pain of it, impaling himself on them again and again and healing in an effort to stay sane, stay here, not start screaming again until there’s nothing left but a shell of the man he was.   
  
Fury. Grief. Loss. Grief. Fury. Pleading, begging, threatening. It’s quiet in his head, yet he feels like he’s screaming still for all of that. Pain, heal, pain, heal, as tears keep falling, and no matter the things he’s done he cannot comprehend that Hiro has left him here, like this, for always. He’ll come. He has to come. He wouldn’t. He would. He’s not coming. He did. He’s gone.   
  
The air thins despite his best efforts. He’s too deep. It’s too close. Everything is seeping out and the darkness is creeping in from around him to replace what was there inside, pushing him out, further away, reaching for even the spark that always burns. His cells can repair themselves, but as quick as they do, his body recognizes the lack of oxygen and they break down again. Visions dance before him, whispers slide through his brain and ghosts’ mouths open with sharp teeth, gnashing through memory, dream and hope.  
  
* * *  
  
He watches him, his conscience, as he sleeps next to the man he barely remembers being in an inn outside a village whose name he's long since forgotten. He watches himself watch him, the duality of the scene making him want to scream, to reach out, to shake sense into him, into both of them. Kensei’s fingers raise, reach, wanting to trace over lips and eyes of this miracle boy who has sprung into his life and given him hope, purpose, direction, meaning. It wouldn’t be hard, would it? To make them both forget the girl with a kiss, a touch, a smile. No matter how she beams at him, it is always the boy he looks to for approval, the boy’s smile that means more. He almost left, but then he stayed, and Kensei wants to believe it was for him. Adam, watching, feels his lips curl in a snarl. Not for him, he knows now, but for her, for the traitorous bitch. He begs Kensei to reach, to touch, to make that connection, to shift closer to the sleeping form, and pull him against him, make him his so thoroughly he’ll never think to look at her again. But Kensei’s hand falls, confusion on his face as he slowly sinks back down on to the bed. With one last look, he turns away from the boy, turning his back with a sigh. Adam remembers that he doesn’t sleep.  
  
* * *  
  
He doesn’t want to be there, and tries to back away as soon as he sees the cherry blossoms. Not here, never again here. He’s blocked it out for so long, pieces of the past he won’t touch upon, because it hurts to remember how to feel, what he felt. To remember what it meant, once, to love. But he’s pulled, fast and furious, behind Kensei’s rushing steps. Hiro disappeared, in the flash of a gun. He could be hurt. He could be injured. Or Yaeko could be, he reminds himself, trying to focus on how history is supposed to go. Adam wants to hit him, or grab him, hold him back as he moves toward the trees. He reaches, but he cannot touch the man he was. He lacks Hiro’s power, and so he trails behind him, gut twisting, feeling the worry flooding off of Kensei.  
  
He knows the instant Kensei sees them. He feels it, the kick to the stomach, the need to be sick, the tears that spring to his eyes that he’ll never cry, even in private. He feels the wood again—wood and splinters digging into skin and he thrusts his hands unconsciously against the coffin lid again, nearly screaming this time with the pain as he tries to drive one fully through his wrist—rough under his palms as he grips the tree and watches. Beautiful. Idyllic. Two lovers in springtime. It’s hell. Adam tries to pull away, won’t look, but he feels Kensei’s silent cry, until he has to, breath coming faster as grief and shock give way to a rage, burning through him.  
  
* * *  
  
The light is low, and Adam gets there first, watching Hiro as he spreads the gunpowder over the guns. He’s still reeling from before, and he knows it is mostly Kensei’s hate. While Hiro has occupied his thoughts, always, Yaeko has been nothing but one of the ghosts for centuries. A masked man enters, and the fury washes over him again.   
  
“I thought you’d come here.”  
  
Hiro spins, staring at him, and Adam can see the determination, the hope, on his face that Kensei, he knows, will fail to care about. “This many guns in Japan, they will crush history. I cannot let White Beard win. We can still stop this. Together.”  
  
Adam fights Kensei’s rage as he pulls the mask off, wanting to interfere again, to beg him to listen. But there’s a chill in the ice blue eyes, even as his lips curve in something that might almost be a smile. “We did make a good team, you and I. You showed me how to be a hero. How to love. And then? You took it all away.” Adam cries out, though neither of them can hear them, as Kensei swings the sword. The fight makes him pound the lid of the coffin again, wanting anything but to be trapped, watching this. “Do it, Hiro. Stop time. Kill me. Cut off my head.” The words come, echoing back through time to the present. A plea he would make now. Anything but this, but Hiro’s answer would be the same.   
  
“I will not do it. I still have faith in you.” Except that he didn’t, or he wouldn’t have left Adam here, like this, enclosed, head hurting now as his body struggles for air.  
  
“The honorable Hiro Nakamura. He won’t kill you, he’ll just lie. Steal.” Another slash, another pain ripping through him. Another scream inside his head that he won’t let out.  
  
“I wanted to help you become a hero!”  
  
“I never claimed to be anything more than a hack. A drunk.” Though that had never been enough, would never be enough again.  
  
“Do not punish the world for my mistakes!” Was he? Was that what this was? Was that why he was here?   
  
“I only want to punish you, Hiro. Yaeko is right. She’s not destined to be my princess. She’s destined to die.” He remembers the words too clearly, too strong, the fury behind them, to destroy the thing between him and what he wants. The boy screams his defiance, and finally, Kensei thinks he’ll do it, put him out of his misery. He’s on the ground, he’s let go of his sword. Please, god, just let him strike. But he doesn’t. Against everything, he offers his hand.   
  
“Take my hand. We must get out of here, now.”  
  
Take it, Adam screams at Kensei. Take it, take it and spare us this, please. God. Take it.  
  
But the blue eyes harden more, the kiss that was replacing the one that never was, hard in his memory, pain too fresh to see beyond. “Never! As long as I have breath, anything you love, I will lay to waste. I swear. You will suffer.”  
  
Then there is pain and fire and the Earth roars up to swallow him again.  
  
* * *  
  
He’s crying, again. He can feel the wetness on his cheeks, hear his sobs over the roaring in his ears, or perhaps they _are_ the roaring sound filling the small box that seems smaller now. Regret mingles with the fury, and he wants another dream. What could have been, what he could have done, how he could have, where it went wrong, where it went from heaven to hell, to lonely stretches that slid through centuries like glaciers of ice across a barren plane. The present slides by faster, there, every moment, every possibility, though no hands were held out for him to ignore, except in eyes he hadn’t seen in too long.  
  
* * *  
  
Kaito’s surprise is almost ludicrous, his face drifting across Adam’s eyelids in its acceptance and sadness. He doesn’t fight. He knows he is reaping what he sows, and somewhere in his eyes Adam sees a trace of the boy and his hand and the knowledge of mistakes and acceptance of consequences he’s never been willing to pull into himself. He lets himself feel it, hoping to cleanse it. Years, locked away. Years, forgotten. Years, betrayed, as the name Nakamura goes from loved to hated to destroyed.   
  
He wonders how close he lies, how many feet separate them. If he dug sideways could he curl himself around the corpse of his victim, and if he had foresworn that feeling, lapels under his hand, hurtling downward, blood washing over him, would it have ended differently? If he had waited, if he had let the virus take his revenge, if he had sent Maury instead of needing it, desperate and visceral…  
  
* * *  
  
Carp. On the floor at his feet. So easy to take the sword and run him through, though it would cost him Peter in that moment—to strike an unarmed boy. And later, standing, sword to his neck. So easy to let his hand slip, but he’s there, in front of him and the disappointment in his eyes cuts deeper than any blade. Again, the wounds come at his hands, when no one else can touch him, no one else can take him. No one else can break him. He’s almost glad when Peter flings him away, hand shaking on the sword and unsure which of them he wants to plunge it into.  
  
* * *  
  
He doesn’t have far to wander, to find his way to that vault. It’s still there, the need, the belief. The hope that somehow Hiro will understand.  
  
“Kensei! You were my friend.”  
  
He doesn’t want to pull the sword, but he does, the words spilling out, from where they were before. “You were more than a friend to me. You were my inspiration. I was a rudderless drunk and then you came along and taught me to be a hero.”  
  
“Only to have you become a villain.”  
  
That fucking disappointment slices through him and he wants to scream, lash out, run him through or slam him into a wall and _make_ him understand. “I learned that from you….Wars. Famine. Disease. 400 years later and nothing has changed. When god wasn’t happy with what he created, he made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights. He just washed it all away. And he had the right idea, because when this virus is released, those of us who are left will be granted a second chance. And I’ll be their hero.” It’s there, at his fingertips, the vial close in his hand. So easy. So simple. All the problems gone, and when he saves them—when he saves _him_ \--it will wash the past away.  
  
“You are not god.”  
  
It’s not what he wants to hear from the boy who thought he was near to one, who followed in his footsteps, who begged him to be the fantasy figure from his childhood tales, molding him whether he wanted to be or not into something new the world had never seen. “Really? I’ve lived for over 400 years. Who’s to say I’m not going to live 400 more?” Defiance. Fury. Guilt. Need. Want. Adam then and Adam here, both of them begging for just a moment, something to change, anything.   
  
But it doesn’t.   
  
“I should have killed you. Long ago. And I should kill you now. For my father.”  
  
* * *  
  
But he didn’t. The Earth claims him now, instead, but not the way he would have prefer. Eternity still stretches, only now without hope. Not that he’ll acknowledge he ever had that hope. Not that he’ll ever say he wanted that hand, extended again. Not that he’ll wonder if he would have put the virus back if Hiro had just _asked_ , had reached for him, had said they could change things, together, not this way. If he’d forgiven, if Adam could forgive, if they could find that place.  
  
They didn’t. He’s here and he’s fairly convinced that the coffin has been placed on a merry-go-round, spinning around until he feels sick, and his breathing is gasps now, lungs desperately struggling for air, for anything to pull him up out of the dark, out of the cold. He can’t feel his feet. He can’t feel his hands, no matter how hard he thinks he’s pressing them into the wood. They’re stuck there, hung on splinters, the weight tearing skin back downward, though he can’t pull them free on his own. It’s creeping up on him, small choking noises drowning out the images, catching him, pulling him back to this, to now, to horror. The weight on his chest grows, and all the gasping in the world isn’t helping. He’s going to pass out, one part of his brain says, quietly, and then he will die, and there will be nothing, no future, no revival, not again, because no one will ever find him. Hopelessness envelops him, but he’s too tired to cry, too tired to plead, to cold to even shiver. He wants to fight, but there’s nothing left to fight for.   
  
As he slides under, letting it claim him, he dreams he feels a hand, closing over his, pulling him free, with air on his face and soft words of remorse whispered in his ear, kisses pressing to skin, begging him to fight, to breathe, to wake.   
  
But nothing comes, the touch is but a phantom, and the darkness is absolute in its unforgiving silence.


End file.
